The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

14 Manuel Azaña (AR), prime minister (president of the council of ministers) and minister of war; Jose ´ Giral (AR), minister of marine; Luis Zulueta (indep.), minister of state; Jaume Carner (AC), minister of finance; Santiago Casares Quiroga (ORGA), minister of interior; álvaro de Albornoz (PRRS), minister of justice; Marcelino Domingo (PRRS), agriculture, industry and commerce; Fernando de los Ríos (PSOE), education; Indalecio Prieto (PSOE), public works and Francisco Largo Caballero (PSOE), minister of labour.

15 In October 1931, the Alfonsine monarchists, headed by Antonio Goicoechea, set up Acción Nacional (which later became Acción Popular). Carlist monarchists, who supported their own pretender, Alfonso Carlos, belonged to their own organization, the Traditionalist Communión. Goicoechea later set up Renovación Española with other monarchists, such as Ramiro de Maeztu, Pedro Sáinz Rodríguez and José María Pemán. Gil Robles, who later split from Acción Nacional in March 1933, formed the major parliamentary Catholic coalition of the right, known as the CEDA, Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas.

16 The first manifestations of fascism in Spain existed in two reviews: La Gaceta literaria, edited by Ernesto Giménez Caballero, and La conquista del Estado, directed by Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, and published by a group which joined itself with the very Catholic and conservative Juntas Castellanas de Acción Hispánica, founded by Onésimo Redondo. This union made up las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (JONS). There was also a strange fascist party, although Catholic and monarchist, the Partido Nacionalista Español, founded by Dr Jose´ María Albiñana, which almost immediately merged with the Bloque Nacional of Calvo Sotelo. Jose´ Antonio Primo de Rivera, Rafael Sánchez Mazas and Julio Ruiz de Alda started the Movimiento Español Sindicalista which in October 1933 would be refounded with the name: Falange Española.

17 Azaña appointed General Miguel Cabanellas as head of the Civil Guard in Sanjurjo’s place.

18 Emilio Esteban Infantes, General Sanjurjo, Barcelona, 1957, p. 235.

19 The law of agrarian reform applied only to Salamanca, Extremadura, La Mancha and Andalucia, where estates of more than 250 hectares accounted for more than half of all land. The slow process, opposed at every turn by landowners, exasperated the landless peasants. By the end of 1934 no more than 117,000 hectares had been expropriated and only 12,000 families out of the 200,000 planned for in the programme had been resettled (Carrión, La reforma agraria…p. 129).

20 Manuel Azaña, Discursos políticos, Barcelona, 2004, pp. 179–219.

21 Jerome R. Mintz, Los anarquistas de Casas Viejas, Diputación Provincial, Cádiz, 1994.

22 The CEDA obtained 24.4 per cent of the votes and the Partido Republicano Radical 22 per cent. In total, the right won 204 seats and the centre 170. The left won only 93, largely because of the weighting given in the electoral law to favour coalitions (Julio Gil Pecharromán, Historia de la Segunda República Española (1931–1936), Madrid, 2002, p. 179).

23 El Socialista, 3 January 1934, quoted Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union and Communism, London, 2004, p. 46.

24 Payne, ibid.

25 In 1933, both Salazar in Portugal and Dollfuss in Austria had introduced corporatist regimes, strongly influenced by Catholicism, and had suppressed socialist organizations. It was not surprising, therefore, that the PSOE should suspect Gil Robles, who had assumed some of the fascist imagery then fashionable, of similar intentions. But Largo Caballero completely rejected the warnings of moderates within his own party. Gil Robles, although initially impressed by Hitler and National Socialism in Germany, rapidly turned against it.

26 A. Saborit, Julián Besteiro, Buenos Aires 1967, pp. 238–40.

27 Azaña, Obras completas, vol. iv, Mexico, 1967, p. 652.

28 Marías, Una vida presente, p. 175.

29 ‘La aparación del juvenilismo, y por tanto de la violencia, en la política española.’ ibid. p. 148.

30 La Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra (FNTT).

31 Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, London, 1977, p. 133.

32 Santos Juliá, ‘Fracaso de una insurrección y derrota de una huelga: los hechos de octubre en Madrid’ in Estudios de historia social, 1984, p. 40.

33 Franco wrote in 1956: ‘La revolución de Asturias fue el primer paso para la implantación del comunismo en nuestra nación…La revolución había sido concienzudamente preparada por los agentes de Moscú’ (Jesús Palacios, La España totalitaria, Barcelona, 1999, p. 29).